Sunday Serenity #50

Today, Saturday, was a pretty good day though I slept most of it away. But that is what made it good. The cough relented enough to allow it. I haven't had much good sleep since this thing started over ten days ago. Before the cough set in around the middle of this week, it was fever dreams and breathing issues. Does this sound like I'm leading up to an ode to sleep for my Sunday Serenity post? Well no, I've got my hopes up that I will feel up to reading by tomorrow so I have my sights set on starting Duma Key finally. If I don't start it by Sunday evening, I might as well not start it at all since it is due Thursday and it is just over 600 pages.

I suppose it sounds a bit oxymoronic to link a Stephen King story to either Sunday or serenity. But then I don't believe that serenity is about suppressing the negative emotions but rather about learning to witness them rise up in your consciousness without allowing them to possess your consciousness or dictate your behavior. Story is a powerful method for accessing these emotions--the dark places in your psyche--in safe mode.

And it sounds from the cover description that Duma Key is a meditation on that very concept though the access node is painting rather than story. But then I see painting and other artistic endeavors as a form of story presentation. I'm biased that way. I see story everywhere. I'm convinced human consciousness was created for and by story--that story is the DNA of our psyche.


Here is Stephen King talking about Duma Key

Here is a trailer for Duma Key


Book Description:

No more than a dark pencil line on a blank page. A horizon line, maybe. But also a slot for blackness to pour through...

A terrible construction site accident takes Edgar Freemantle's right arm and scrambles his memory and his mind, leaving him with little but rage as he begins the ordeal of rehabilitation. A marriage that produced two lovely daughters suddenly ends, and Edgar begins to wish he hadn't survived the injuries that could have killed him. He wants out. His psychologist, Dr. Kamen, suggests a "geographic cure," a new life distant from the Twin Cities and the building business Edgar grew from scratch. And Kamen suggests something else.

"Edgar, does anything make you happy?"

"I used to sketch."

"Take it up again. You need hedges... hedges against the night."

Edgar leaves Minnesota for a rented house on Duma Key, a stunningly beautiful, eerily undeveloped splinter of the Florida coast. The sun setting into the Gulf of Mexico and the tidal rattling of shells on the beach call out to him, and Edgar draws. A visit from Ilse, the daughter he dotes on, starts his movement out of solitude. He meets a kindred spirit in Wireman, a man reluctant to reveal his own wounds, and then Elizabeth Eastlake, a sick old woman whose roots are tangled deep in Duma Key. Now Edgar paints, sometimes feverishly, his exploding talent both a wonder and a weapon. Many of his paintings have a power that cannot be controlled. When Elizabeth's past unfolds and the ghosts of her childhood begin to appear, the damage of which they are capable is truly devastating.

The tenacity of love, the perils of creativity, the mysteries of memory and the nature of the supernatural -- Stephen King gives us a novel as fascinating as it is gripping and terrifying.

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And as an added bonus: Here is Stephen King handing out advice to young people considering a career in writing.

Join us for a moment of serenity.